I've got a couple of questions, and while I've read through some of the stuff out there, I would like some real user input on things.

Here's what I got planned. I would like to make an super mythbox that will also function as a digital file storage for my house.

My plans are to buy 3 500GB SATA drives and RAID 5 them for stable storage. I would like to get a hardware RAID controller and was wondering if anyone had any luck with specific cards. The cheaper the better, but I'm willing to give up cheap for EASY TO INSTALL! I've spent HOURS on my current mythbox and don't care to go there again.

Also, while I don't have HD right now, I'd like to at least put in the infrastructure to handle that in the near future. I'm looking at a X2 5000 or so. Will that have enough umph to take care of HD?

One other thing that's bothered me is the question of how people are getting HD AUDIO into their systems. Is there a way to use the sound card as a capture device or is there a video capture card that has optical in?

Of course, favorite MotherBoards stories are also welcome.

Many thanks in advance,
TheErk

By far, the best hardware raid cards out there are by 3ware. They aren't cheap, but they are "true" hardware raid -- not under-the-covers software raid on top of a promise or whatever chipset. Three 500G drives in a raid 5 nets you 1G of storage -- a nice start. If you move up to HD you'll want more.

I have a 750G drive at /myth/tv for my HD shows alone. Another 750G at /myth/video for my "dvd changer" function. Fiinally, a 400G drive for / and /myth, for mp3s, games, etc. My file server is a different box.

I dunno about HD audio. I use SPDIF out with my HDTV shows, which are encoded in AC3. In that case, the audio is already part of the stream captured by the card, so I don't try to record it separately. You might look into what it takes to "rip" an HD-Audio disc. Search the usualy places that have ripping information -- doom9.net, etc. Or the venues that concentrate on home theater.

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Cool! Thanks Liv2Cod! That answers a couple of questions. And asks one more.

First off, I'm not trying to rip a HDAudio disc. (I was afraid someone might misunderstand me )

I guess I'm still not understanding how the HDaudio (from the TV) is getting recorded. How are you capturing your signal? Does AC3 come through the analog somehow?

Also, just how many hours (approx) will 750Gigs get me in HD?!?

I thought that 1TB would have been more than plenty for vid storage for me. Of course, I don't need HUGE amounts of hours, but...

--TheErk

Over The Air HDTV is about 6 gigs per hour of show, so you'll get about 100 hours of HD with a 750 gig drive. It sounds like a lot, but MythTV is addicting! The HDTV is captured with an HD tuner card in the computer, not through your HD tv set. The audio and video are both in the same data stream from tuner card, so no audio card in needed to capture it to the hard drive. Its already stored with the video data stream. You will need an audio card for playback.

You don't "need" that strong of a processor (X2 5000). What it will allow you to do vs a 3000 level Sempron/Athlon is

- view HD content without a video card or XvMC
- flag commercials while watching tv without affecting playback
- compress your recordings (i.e., convert to Xvid) very quickly. Rule of thumb allow 10gb per hour of HD recording. It adds up faster than you think.

Straight recording and playback of HD can be done with a Sempron and XvMC.

I know I don't need anything that huge, but I am wanting to get away from xvmc and the larger processors aren't really that much more expensive. Plus like you mentioned, that allows for super quick encoding and I'll probably run a few emulators on it too

Will a X2 5500 run 1080p in software?

Also, that's cool for OTA HD, but what about from a box like cable or satellite? In my area OTA HD is highly unlikely due to some terrain issues and the fact I live in the middle of nowhere

I've still never seen someone say for sure if you can capture through the sound card instead of the video capture card.

--TheErk

HD feeds from cable can be captured with a QAM capable card or if you have a firewire enabled cable box. Both OTA and QAM feeds use MPEG-2 to transmit the audio with the video. So that's why you don't need the audio card for capturing. The HD tuners are just capturing the MPEG Transport Stream and saving the file on the hard drive. Unlike SD tuners that take the analog signal and encode it on the fly into a digital file. As far as I know there aren't any HD encoders that can capture HD like SD. In other words, you can't record HD from an HDMI connection or component.

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Ahh, that makes since now. So the HD capture cards don't actually do any encoding as such, they just capture.

Hmm, wonder why there aren't any capture cards that use component to capture?

Thanks for clarifying!

--TheErk